The liberal critique of democracy, from Constant to Hoppe4 reading minutes

Liberals have always been suspicious of unlimited forms of power, whether monarchical, revolutionary or democratic. They have been the most vigorous advocates of the strict limitation of power, whoever holds it and however it is organized.

Benjamin Constant, the great liberal thinker of the French-speaking world, was already warning of the danger of democracy's claim to absorb the whole of social life. His famous speech De la liberté des Anciens comparée à celle des Modernes (1819) explains that there is a principled opposition between political freedom, based on direct participation in collective power, and the individual freedom of modern societies, centered on private autonomy, property and security of rights.

For Constant, granting absolute sovereignty to the people was tantamount to replacing the tyranny of a monarch with that of the majority.